Throughout any typical day, a given person often encounters many situations where a decision made by one or more different people affects them in some way.
For example, a merchant makes decisions such as where to locate their store, one or more products to carry, and one or more products to advertise, in order to try to encourage consumers to purchase items. If a consumer feels sufficiently motivated by one or more of the decisions made by the merchant, the consumer may visit the merchant to view and/or purchase one or more items. However, the consumer is not tied to the merchant in any way, and, although the merchant and the consumer may share commonalities, those commonalities rarely play any role in getting the consumer and the merchant together, and achieving a successful purchase transaction.
In a second example, a search, for example, in a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system, or associated with a web browser may use information provided by a user in order to search a database to determine one or more database items that are relevant to the user-provided information, later either using one or more database items for other purposes, or providing a list of one or more of the database items to the user. As in the case of the merchant trying to sell merchandise, the situation involving the search using a GPS system, a web browser, or other search tools is accomplished with little or no association between the search results and the person initiating the search. Thus, the search results are often ranked according to how others used the search results, with little or no consideration given regarding about how the particular searcher goes about their life and any preferences the particular searcher may have beyond the information provided as search criteria.
In the GPS case, a search may be made by a consumer, for example, who wishes to find a local meat market. The search may use a local and/or a remote database to find meat markets in the same city, and may display the local meat markets according to the given meat market's proximity to the consumer's present location. Thus, there is little or no consideration given regarding how the particular searcher goes about their life and any preferences the particular searcher may have beyond the information provided as search criteria.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a system and method for customizing a user experience based on automatically weighted criteria, resulting in optimized searching and improved computing system functionality.